ARK/GM responce time

[___________Oddfellow]

We all know that many things that cause lots of problems for a large number of players(exploits that effect pvp, verbal abuse/obscenity...) will only be acted upon if they are witnessed by an ARK or GM. How many people have petitioned only to hear "Well, they arent doing it now, so theres nothing we can do." Well, guess what ARKS, if you turn your back, you'll miss the show. Now, I'm not saying this is deliberate, but it sure seems to me that if you are only going to respond to something reported to you if you witness it, you should make a lot better effort to show up in a timely fashion.

Player A decides that is side isnt doing so well down in the Tarasque dungeon, so he goes and aggros the whole dungeon, runs up into the middle of the Side B and terminates. Side B /petitions. 30 or so minutes later, "This is ARK C, responding to your petition. The player in question is not currently doing anything wrong, and we didnt see what happened before. Sorry, theres nothing we can do."

If certain things in this game can only be resolved by ARKS(and until somebody gets off their duffs and fixes all these known bugs and exploits that will continue to be the case) the responce time of those responsible is laughable. Players are forced to rely on game employees and representatives to enforce the rules, yet there is such a lag between the incident in question, the subsiquent report, and the eventual responce that the simple truth is if you want to cheat or otherwise violate the rules of the agreement we all had to accept you will get away with it. And thats just sad.

So, after all of that(sorry), my suggestion is this: take whatever means necessary to decrease the responce time. If there is a large tower battle about to occur, and you know this as well we do because it is almost always preceeded by "Clan/Omni Org XXX has entered a state of war...."(repeated several times), its not too subtle, someone who is responsible for responding to complaints should quietly scout out the area. If there is a large battle in the Tarasque dungeon, that thats not hard to figure out either, there are large numbers of angry Omni and Clan running into it and appearing at reclaims minutes later, maybe an ARK should go in and have a look.

Police dont just sit in the station waiting for people to report crimes. Sometimes they actually patrol and PREVENT transgressions. I know its a stretch, but maybe the people whose RESPONSIBILITY it is to enforce the rules of AO should actually do something to prevent these problems, or at least catch the offender in the act, rather than sitting on their hands only to say, "Sorry, I wasnt looking, can you ask them to break the rules again?"

[______________Orchid]

I agree fully.

[____________Fakonamo]

Absolutely!

In addition to general response time decreases I think it would be nice if for instance, when planning a large tower attack, you could request ARK/GM presence ahead of time. Have a petition class "towerfight" and allow players to petition for a moderator to be present for the fight (maybe even have 1 or 2 on duty "Notum Wars Moderators" that only handle this sort of thing), or at least for the fight to be logged by an official so as to prevent the kind of exploiting, griefing and cheating that is rampant in many tower fights instead of subjecting the players to "Sorry, but theres nothing I can do because I didnt see it. I'll report it, but dont expect any changes, please just suffer through our failures".

Lets face it, there are rarely many large tower battles going on simultaniously, would it be so hard to devote some attention to them directly?

It seems to me that the current role of the ARK/GMs is to pacify players, rather than really help. Sure they can warp you if your stuck, but other than that they seem only capable of trying to placate players who experience problems.

[Niagara]

In the case of those annoying Terasque area aggores...hows about they just make it so that a player has a max agro...as in, can only agro a certain number of creatures at a time...this way he can't pull trains?